is enough to make a poor man like me dissatisfied with his lot, or the present arrangements of society, which amounts to precisely the same thing, I suppose. Deuce take me, if it is not enough to make me turn Agrarian, Chartist, Radical, or whatever may be the new name for the old discontent! Just contrast our positions! Here are you, at one-and-twenty years of age, entirely free from all toil and care for the whole remainder of your life. You will now return to a sumptuous southern home, on a magnificent estate, where troops of friends wait to welcome you, and troops of slaves attend to serve you, and where your bride, the very pearl of beauty, dreams of and languishes for your presence; and, above all-yes, I speak reflectingly, above all-more than sumptuous home, and troops of friends, and trains of servants, and blushing bride-where, lying perdue at your ser. vice, is a plenty of the root of all evil

'Gold to save-gold to lend

Gold to give-gold to spend.'

While I!-well, I shall just plod on in the old way, teaching school one half the year to pay my college expenses for the other, until I find myself in some lawyer's shop, in arrears with my landlady, in debt to my washerwoman-detesting to walk up the street, because I should pass the tailor's store-abhorring to walk down it, because I should be sure to see the shoemaker standing in his door. With no more comfort or convenience in my life than can be enjoyed between my little back-chamber, up four pair of stairs in a cheap boarding-house, and the straight-backed chair and high-topped desk of the law shop. And no

more love, or hope, or poetry, in my life, than may be found bound up between the covers of Coke upon Lyttleton. Or perhaps I shall turn private tutor, and advertise, 'A highly respectable young gentleman, a graduate of Yale College, wishes to obtain,' &c.; and you, who will be by this time the grave head of a family, with several little domestic liabilities, will probably answer the advertisement; and I shall find myself teaching the names of the keys of knowledge to young Mark and his brothers. Oh !"

“Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!" laughed Sutherland. Oh, you'll patronise me, rather! You'll be kind to me; for you'll say to yourself and friends, 'He was a college friend of mine, poor fellow.' I fancy I hear and see you saying it now, with that careless, cordial, jolly condescension of yours."

"Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! My dear Lincoln ! My dear fellow, why should that be? Why should you be pettifogger or pedagogue, unless you have a vocation for it? Why should anybody do what they don't want to do? Life is rich-full of wealth, and love, and joy, and glory. Enter and take possession."

"Enter and take possession! Yes, that is what you can do. Life is full of wealth, and love, and joy, and glory, for you, indeed; and you can afford to mock me with those words! But, never mind, my fine flamingo! I have heard the wise say that happiness is not so unequally distributed, after all. And I, for one, don't believe this cake of comfort is going to be so very unjustly divided between us, or that you will have all the white sugar on the top, and I all the burnt paper at the bottom."

"See here, my friend, remember that we good-fornothing Mississippians are not initiated into the mys teries of the kitchen, and therefore I don't understand your culinary figure of speech at all."

"Oh, go on! go on! You're a young bear!"

"A young bear! Comrades! Oh, they are all gone! A young bear? Oh, I suppose he alludes to my black whiskers and hair, and my shag over coat!"

"I mean your trouble is all before you!"

"Trouble? Oh, my dear boy, that is a word with out a meaning! Trouble? What is trouble? What idea is the word designed to represent? Trouble? Oh, my dear fellow, it is all a mistake, a mere notion, a superstition, a prejudice; a saying of old folks, who, being near the verge of departure from this bright, glad, joyous, jubilant world, vainly try to console themselves by slandering it as a world of trouble, and talk of a better one, to which they are progressing. If this world in itself is not 'good,' as the Creator pronounced it to be in the beginning, by all the rules of comparison, how can any other world be said to be better?"

"Well, I believe in the better world as much as they do; but look you! the pleasantest notion I have of Heaven is its being-being"

"Oh, don't let it go any further-as good as this world, and only better as far as it endures longer. This world is full of all that is great and glorious for enjoyment! And, Lincoln, my fine fellow, enter and take possession! Don't teach or study law! Don't plod; it is ungentlemanly. Somebody, I suppose, must teach and study law, and do such things-but don't

you. Do you leave it to those a-those persons athose in fact who have the plebeian instinct of labor; you apprehend? They really enjoy work now! Just think of it! I suppose that gracious nature, intending them to carry on the work of the world, endowed them with a taste for it! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! But I've no vocation for it! Neither have you, my dear boy. Don't force your nature in an opposite direction to which it tends, therefore! Enter life, and take possession !"

"Humph! thank you! This is to say, 'follow my attractions,' and if they 'attract' me to lead an idle life, and live upon other people, why, so much the better-they are my attractions; and if they 'attract' me to pick my host's pocket, or run away with his daughter, it is the same thing by the same law."

"Ha! ha! ha! Oh, certainly; remembering that your host might experience an attraction to blow your brains out."

"Pleasant points to be drawn to. I guess I shall not follow my attractions! I'll stick to the little law shop, and relieve weariness by grumbling. Some distinguished men have emerged from those little law dens; and, by the way, seriously, my dear Mark, I think that I, that you, even you, possess those very qualities out of which really distinguished men are formed, and that if destiny had not 'thrust' a sort of moneyed and landed greatness upon you, that even you would 'achieve' some judicial, political, diplomatic, or intellectual greatness of some sort."

"Ha! ha! ha! even I! Well, that is a stretch of possibility, indeed. Even I, humph! Mais à nos moutons. Will you come home with me? Do come

and be my guest à éternité-or until you win some rich Mississippi beauty. Woo beauty, not Blackstone, for a fortune. You have so much more genius for the first than for the last, my fine fellow."

"Oh, then you would have me turn fortune-hunter, and, under cover of your friendship and introduction, aim at some heiress, and bring her down, and so secure wealth ?"

"Set fire to you, no! Whom do you take me for? Do you think that I would present an adventurer to Southern creoles? No, sir! But I do want you to fall in love with a Southern beauty, and fortune would follow, of course."

"I do not see it at all. There are several links wanting in that chain of reasoning. But, apropos of beauty, love, and marriage. Tell me something more of Miss Sutherland, votre belle fiancée."

"India! listen, you." And he took Lauderdale's arm, and turned to walk up and down the room for a confidential chat. "Listen, you! I named her just now over the wine. I regret to have done so. Would it were undone! But so it is; in some moment of excitement a word passes our lips, and it is unrecallable forever. She is so sacred to my heart, so divine to my soul! I often wonder if Helen of Argos were half as beautiful as she-my India."

"What a strange, charming name that is for a woman!"

"Is it not? But, rich, luxurious, and gorgeous, in its associations, too—(and that is why it was given to her) it suits her. She is India. Her mother was like her-a beautiful, passionate Havanienne, rich in genius, poetry, song-luxuriating in the beautiful creations